


Dark Roast

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (TV)
Genre: Angst, Ghosts?, Grieving, Kunzite hates everyone, M/M, Musing, Sailor Moon Classic, grief cleaning, it's a sequel but you can read it without the first one, maybe? - Freeform, post-episode 35, there could be, up to you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 11:29:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2149095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the days after the Silver Crystal is found, Kunzite tries to go on living, and makes plans. Standalone sequel to The French Do It With A Press.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Roast

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much just for folks who've never read the manga: as a rule I tend to cherrypick Sailor Moon metacanon to do whatever fits for a given fic, although I do have a giant animangical headcanon that incorporates many bits of several canons. So in case you don't know: while the Classic anime pretty much refutes the idea of ghosts, they're actually pretty prevalent in the corresponding manga arc. 
> 
> Further notes: A sequel to _The French Do It With A Press_ , but both can be read independently of the other. (I think this one's better if you read _Press_ first, but of course I do.)
> 
> Final notes: The ending is supposed to be open-ended. If you're frustrated by not knowing if all of that was real or if Kunzite is just going mad, sorry. Zoisite would be pleased to know I've screwed with your brain.

_You can't throw that out._

Kunzite's hand hovers over the cheap paperback on the nightstand. _The Dark Half_ , the cover says. _Stephen King_. It's a tawdry thing, written in a language Zoisite reads haltingly and with many stops and starts when the sentence structure eludes him. There's a bookmark stuck about a third of the way through it. _Why do you read that trash?_ Kunzite asked him, about two weeks ago, and for an answer Zoisite had stuck out his tongue, and Kunzite had pulled the book out of his hands, and after the ensuing scuffle he'd had to pull the bed away from the wall to rescue Zoisite's precious second-rate American horror fiction. And, too, more pressing: his own shirt.

Oh, they'd had a good time of it. But still.

Still.

If he'd known then that Zoisite had eight days to live, he would have let him keep on with the damned book. And maybe, buried in its pages, he wouldn't have formulated that vengeful little plan, and he'd still be—

_No._

That way, Kunzite decided about two days ago, lies madness. Right about the time he cleaned out under the bed, clearing away Zoisite's shoes and old clothes he'd forgotten about and a coverless copy of _Frankenstein_ and a magazine he'd taken a single glance at before shoving it into the trash bag to protect his lover's privacy. The magazine was about the time he'd started feeling not just grief, but guilt—if he'd been home more, paid more attention, showed more appreciation, hell, if just once he'd said _I have to work today, you should come with me_. 

And then somewhere behind the magazine he'd found a pair of garters, and it was lucky, really, that Beryl didn't make a habit of checking in on missing officers, because he can only imagine how insane he would have looked: Kunzite of the Dark Kingdom, leader of the Shitennou, sitting on a bedroom floor crying silently into a thin strip of green silk. They no longer had an anniversary in the true sense of the word—neither remembered the actual date they'd first met, much less the one their roles had become equal instead of servant and master—but they'd chosen a new one for themselves when they'd awakened a few years ago, a date only two months or so past—and Kunzite remembered the ridiculous outfit he'd walked in on, most endearing not for the level of seduction Zoisite thought he was generating but for the badly-tied corset back he hadn't figured out how to lace by himself. Perfectly executed except in one crucial detail: Zoisite, a biography. 

The corset is gone. Kunzite knows exactly where it is: he was the one who tightlaced it under the sailor uniform Zoisite wore into Tokyo to create the illusion of a bust and waist, and he was the one who cut it away to make way for much-needed air into a destroyed pair of lungs. But the garters remained, probably kicked under the bed when Zoisite rolled out tardy as usual, and after finding them he'd sat on the bedroom floor for the entire rest of the afternoon doing nothing but imagining Zoisite sitting on the bed, banging his heels against the wood and complaining about Kunzite throwing away things he _definitely needed_ , never mind having not seen them for six months or more. 

He hasn't thrown out anything since. His hand hovers over the paperback.

_You can't throw that out, he never finished reading it! He was reading that the night before he died, even your shitty comments couldn't stop him, he was reading it when he was_ alive _, don't you dare._

He pulls his hand away and sighs. He can't stay here with so many of Zoisite's things around him. When he was here to fill the space with his laughter and his questions and his endless chatter, they seemed like cozy background noise to life; now Kunzite feels like they're staring him down, crowding him out, screaming in the silence about what he could have done, what he could have changed. He opens the drawer on the nightstand and paws through an endless litter of free hand lotion samples. Zoisite loved the damned things, Kunzite doesn't know why; it was just a habit he picked up and Kunzite tolerated, in much the same way, Kunzite guesses, that Zoisite tolerated his snoring. 

Under the hand lotion samples and about two dozen bottles of nail polish Kunzite finds a book with a green lace cloth cover and a ribbon to tie it shut. He remembers picking it up as an afterthought when he was getting legal pads—Beryl can keep her crystal ball, Kunzite prefers things written down—and bringing it home for Zoisite in the same offhanded way: _Found this. I thought you might like it._

He'd assumed it would be one of those things Zoisite would keep on the coffee table for awhile because it was “pretty,” and then it'd get relegated to a shelf, and then to a box. Instead he'd been transported with joy and covered Kunzite's face with kisses, and the next time Kunzite had seen it there were pictures sticking out of the top and the metal padlock was gone and replaced with the ribbon that holds it shut now. It needs the ribbon: when Zoisite ran out of pages to write on he just started writing on other things and putting them in the book wherever they'd fit. It doesn't matter how carefully Kunzite unwraps it—he knows he's going to get hit with a shower of Zoisite's papers. He's done this before, albeit never without permission. The photograph on his desk came out of this book. 

A swath of paper falls into his lap. Pictures, poems, drawings Zoisite never had the patience to finish, newspaper clippings that amused him, longer musings that all seem to be in the form of letters. There's also a single receipt: written in a long-forgotten alphabet in a missing language, the thick piece of parchment the only relic Zoisite retains from their life in what Kunzite only thinks of as Before.

It's his receipt of purchase, writing in two hands, one to a side. The front lists an unnamed slave for the cost of thirty-one minar. Kunzite doesn't remember what unit a minar constituted, but he knows the price was small—remembers arguing, in fact, that it was _too_ small for a slave who could write, albeit in an unknown language, and being told by the caravan owner _you told me to bring you the problem ones, and I won't have a witch traveling with me._ At that point, Kunzite still thought he was buying a woman—one he'd rehabilitate, and teach some useful skill to, and then some fellow in town would buy her as a wife, give her citizenship and status, and save her from life as a war orphan. And then the “woman” finally stood up, and Kunzite was forced to make a rapid reassessment.

They'd shared no languages in common then, and the boy had looked thin to the edge of death; had Kunzite been asked he would have given the best estimate that he might produce a homely but serviceable house slave, if he could ever take the animal look out of the eyes. Six months convinced him otherwise: calling the boy merely intelligent was an insult, and regular meals had done wonders for the protruding hips and ribs and patchy, bedraggled hair, but that slightly feral look, the one that made Kunzite believe the trader's story about the boy killing a man in the caravan with not a single touch, but that terrible and forbidden thing, that _magic_ —that never faded. A year's time told him the boy would never make a slave as he was—he simply wouldn't be able to obey, in the same way that fish couldn't walk on dry land. 

Kunzite could have done something about it—could have sent the boy to the whipping post in the square until he was bloody-backed and begging, could have denied him food and a bed. Instead, he offered the boy his freedom, and found himself bewildered when he was turned down—only to hear the sentence that would change both of their lives, then and forever: _if I couldn't prove I owned myself, they'd just pick me up and sell me again._

Zoisite doesn't—didn't—remember coming into Kunzite's house, which surprises Kunzite not at all; but he also has—had—no memory of offering up his only real possession to trade for himself, and that will probably surprise him until he passes from this world into the clearing beyond. 

The back of the paper: one bracelet of zoisite beads, charged for a single manservant, paid in full. 

It occurs to Kunzite as he shoves the pages haphazardly back into Zoisite's diary that only two of those beads survived the transition from that life to this one—one threaded onto the ribbon that holds the book shut, the other sewn into the lining of Kunzite's jacket collar. The rest are long gone, the bracelet broken at some point after Kunzite returned it to him as a gift—the clasp broken during that final battle, maybe, or the string snapped by some enemy's blade. 

One of the papers floats out before Kunzite can wrap the book shut—Zoisite had a trick to it, one Kunzite doubts he'll live long enough to learn. He picks it up to shove it back in, and then a phrase in it catches his attention and he pauses to read. _When you leave me,_ he sees, and discovers his heart hasn't yet broken into pieces so small that it can't be further shattered.

 

_When I leave you? Is that what you thought? The anger in the days before you died, love, is this what it was about?_

“Never,” he says aloud, and his own voice seems to echo back at him even amid Zoisite's clutter. He's fallen quickly into the habit of talking aloud to himself. He's still not sure if he's trying to fill the silence left by the absence of Zoisite's questions and laughter, or if he's going mad. He doesn't much care. “I should have told you more often.”

And there it is: the _should have_ , the _could have_. He wouldn't have dared tell Zoisite his final plan—love has never blinded him to Zoisite's short temper and angry tongue—but could he have taken him a little more in confidence, kept this terrible letter from having been written?

He tosses the book on the bed he hasn't slept in for five days and heads into the kitchen. He can't deal with one more minute surrounded by Zoisite's clothes, Zoisite's books, Zoisite's scent. The living room is as bad as the bedroom, dark golden strands of hair still clinging to the ratty fabric of a chair the two of them bickered for years about throwing out and the mess of papers Zoisite called _don't touch that, I'm planning_ strewn over the coffee table, but the kitchen—Zoisite would have sooner tried to scale a mountain than make dinner. He didn't have the patience for anything more complicated than a sandwich and a cup of tea. 

The kitchen is mostly safe ground. Not Zoisiteless ground—no, not that, there are magnets on the icebox and the dishes in the cupboard are a set Zoisite found during a mission in England when they probably almost had the damned first Senshi right in their hands ( _and if you hadn't told him he was overreacting, he might have stopped their chances of victory right there, right in London, back when he was still alive,_ the voice in his head reminds him)—but safe ground, not void of his personality but lacking in the smaller, more personal things that dig like small shards of glass into Kunzite's heart, where they twist and work their way in. Gold hair on a pillow, for example. Or a necklace tossed carelessly on the dresser, taken for granted that at the end of the day it would be back around its owner's neck.

Or a paperback book laying innocently on a nightstand.

He finds the tea in the cupboard. He'll have a cup. Maybe then he'll turn in for the night. He has duty tomorrow, and if he has his way, it will be the last day of duty. 

The mug he pulls out looks vaguely familiar. Then it looks _very_ familiar, and he nearly drops it.

“You broke this,” he says, into the empty kitchen. The cup is red and white and blue and somehow offensively cheerful. _Vive La France!_ it says, and Zoisite broke this less than a month ago, Kunzite is sure of it. “You did it on purpose. You slammed it on the floor.”

The cup in his hands has most definitely never been shattered into half a dozen pieces. Maybe there were two of them. That would be Zoisite's way—a combination of _then we can match_ and _like hell I'm suffering alone_.

But no—there was a chip in the broken mug's handle, put there by a knife in the sink and Zoisite's inability to wash dishes _gently_ , and Kunzite is looking at that chip right now, porcelain a darker gray against white glaze.

Maybe—

There's no bag to check, because Zoisite was terrible at housework but had a single immutable rule, _the swill always goes out at night_ , a thing Kunzite is sure Beryl must have known when she called Zoisite's broken body “trash.”

But—

_He tried to ask you to come home early the day he broke it,_ the helpful voice in his head reminds him. _And you teased him for it. He had less than two weeks to live, and you_ mocked _him for—_

Some part of him suggests the presence of the mug is an indication this whole nightmarish week has been nothing but a terrible dream, and now that he's found the thing that doesn't belong he'll wake up, Zoisite's arms around his waist and a wild nest of coppery blonde curls in his face. And this time, there will be no sending Zoisite to Tokyo alone; they'll take a day off, to hell with Beryl, and start afresh. Together. Let the Sailor Senshi make what they will of _that_.

It's an attractive idea, and one he'd be more than ready to embrace if not for all the prosaic suggestions to the contrary—the hardness of the stone tiles under his feet, the uneven flicker of a light crystal he hasn't bothered to recharge, the deep red stain in the wooden table where Zoisite spilled half a bottle of wine on a night Kunzite _did_ come home unexpectedly early and startled him into clumsiness. 

In dreams, Kunzite can't smell the sweat and dust of his own grief.

He opens the cupboard again, intending to shove the mug to the back so he can pull out something else—anything else. He'll drink his tea out of a juice glass first.

The kitchen door slams open, letting in a gust of cold air, and just as abruptly slams shut again—like it was haphazardly pushed by someone with little patience and not much interest in whether doors should be opened or shut. 

Like _Zoisite_.

Kunzite's almost sure the brush against his hair wasn't the wind. 

Almost.

He looks down at the mug, and the fingers of his other hand creep to the dagger handle in his belt. It's a dainty, deadly little thing, made out of finest obsidian, and nearly sliced his fingers off when he found it under the mattress. It's exactly the kind of weapon Zoisite would carry, he thinks, and exactly the kind of thing Zoisite would do, leaving a blade like that unsheathed in a place where it could turn on him any time he changed the sheets. He knows, too, what it was intended for.

The first real smile in a week crosses his face. It is the kind that would make his enemies shudder and his friends flee.

“I understand,” he says, no longer convinced the kitchen he's speaking to is an empty one. He puts the mug carefully in the sink, all sloppy glaze and cheap ceramic, and turns on the faucet. Most kitchen sinks don't produce tea-ready water at the turn of a handle, but then, most kitchen sinks aren't owned by Zoisite. 

He drops in an infuser and watches the color of the water change.

Most people in the Dark Kingdom assumed Zoisite's place in Kunzite's life was a pretty face intended for legwork and a quick fuck.

Most people in the Dark Kingdom also never talked to Zoisite for more than five minutes.

First, the Senshi. Then, Endymion. He can leave Beryl; with the Silver Crystal in his hands, he will no longer be the one obligated to kneel or die. 

And then, he imagines, he'll see if the rumors about the Silver Crystal are true. If they are, he'll be happy to see the little black dagger used to its intended purpose by a hand not his own.

There are those, after all, who say the legendary stone can raise the dead.


End file.
